#441 – Motivational Speaker

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released May 5th, 2019. Episode 441. Motivational Speaker.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV Blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: Or RealityInstruments.com.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Which we'll get into. We'll get into that.

Chris Gammell: I'm more of a refugee and a survivor of KiCon. How about that?

Dave Jones: Yeah, let's talk about it. I made it, man.

Chris Gammell: I made it.

Dave Jones: You made it. You came out the other side. Are you like...

Chris Gammell: I'm still digging, man. I'm still digging my way out. But I think as we record this, I've only edited two out of the... God knows how many shows that we'll put out from that. 440 point whatever. We've had two shows so far. I think there's enough to do at least. If I do two per show, I think there'll be like five or six total episodes. I'll probably just smush them all together at the end. Yep. Yeah, lots of...

Dave Jones: So you just sat down with various attendees and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So Alvaro, who's from the Reverse Engineering Podcast, who had shown me how to do... He does this... He did this at tour camp. So I was at a tour camp recording. He was also doing that. But he had the H6, which is a little recorder, and he actually has four microphones plugged into it. So you'll just see him like stand around... Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, exactly. And like...

Dave Jones: Did he have it attached to his backpack or something?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, he just turns his backpack around, puts it in there, kind of sits there, and he can tweak the dials. And then everybody's standing around holding microphones. It's a great little setup. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. And, you know, it's nice to get like... It rejects sound outside decently well. You'll still get some background sound. But it's good. It's like kind of like from the floor, quote unquote. And it's great to get people's perspective. It's like super simple to do stuff. So thanks to Alvaro. And Peter also helped with recording. And then all the great guests too. So it was a lot of fun. I didn't do much recording because I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But I had, you know, it was a blast. The whole weekend was a blast.

Dave Jones: There's an art in recording stuff on the road, either video or audio. As we know. As we know. Getting it down pat. You know, there is an art to that. You know, you're much more into it than I am because you're going to all these shows and things. Sure, sure. Right? Yeah. And either you're running them yourself or you're going to them. And it's, yeah, it's where you, as you said, like getting good audio on like a show floor and stuff like that. That's when you don't want your omnidirectional, even with a lapel microphone, right? If you've got a lapel mic, you might think, oh, that's great. Yeah, it is. But most of them are omni. You know, you can actually get the cartoid ones. Right.

Chris Gammell: And those are the shapes of like where it picks up sound.

Dave Jones: The shapes of where, and those ones you want to put on your shirt and point towards your mouth. And then it sort of rejects the floor noise and, you know, stuff like that. Or you get a handheld one and they're a cartoid pattern.

Chris Gammell: So, but you know all about that. Yep, definitely. It was good to be able to get something. I think just simplicity is the main thing there. And the crazy thing is like that stuff, it's heavy. It's real heavy. You know, like actual like cable, copper cables and like, you know, solid microphones.

Dave Jones: Oh, but when you've got those bloody XLR things, you know, you've got those handheld mics with real, real XLR cables. Yeah. For sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But yeah, you know, the weekend went, the biggest snafu of the weekend was that I lost my wallet for about eight hours.

Dave Jones: You lost your wallet. Right. It turned up.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it turned up. It turns out I just like locked it in a room. And then someone like walks up to me and they're like, hey, Chris, did you, did you mean to leave your wallet in that room? I'm like, nope, sure didn't. Excellent. Yeah. Other than that, I was, you know, that was like a good distraction from the actual stress stuff. And otherwise it was great. All right. So.

Dave Jones: So, so, so you, so you knew your wallet was gone during the show and you were busy concentrating on the show as well as trying to figure out where your wallet was. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. The biggest stress there was like, I was like, I've got about 200 nerds who want to drink beer later and I have to pay for it. And the card that enables that is in the wallet. So better find it or else I'm going to have some trouble.

Dave Jones: Hang on. So, so you were shouting for a couple hundred people.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, it was part of the fee. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Oh, right. Okay. So you took money and yeah, of course you did.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: No. Yeah. It was, it was a paid event.

Chris Gammell: It was paid event. Yeah. It was 99 bucks. You know, some people like speakers went free and volunteers paid and then got their money back when they volunteered, stuff like that. Got it. But it pretty, you know, pretty low. I, I, there was some pushback, like from one person on the forum, at least pushback about their like, well, $99 is too expensive. And I was like, look, I know that's not attainable for everyone. But like a percentage of like how much your travel would be in comparison to that. It's not much. And I think in terms of conferences, like I've been to some conferences where it was like, Oh, $3,200 admission fee. And I'm like, yeah, I'm a speaker. That ticket is.

Dave Jones: Do you know how much it is to go to a Ted talk?

Chris Gammell: No. How much?

Dave Jones: 10 grand.

Chris Gammell: Holy moly.

Dave Jones: Yeah. To go to a Ted talk, Chris Anderson, former guest on the show. He actually tweeted this out.

Chris Gammell: Not the one who, not the one who actually runs Ted. That's, that's pretty confusing. No, no, no, no. The other Chris Anderson. Sorry. DIY drones. Formerly DIY drones.

Dave Jones: He's great on Twitter to follow. There's lots of stuff he comes out with. He doesn't, he's not afraid to speak his mind. That's right. Yep. I love it. And yeah. And he said, Oh, look, I used to go every year, but it's, you know, it's 10 grand and it's just become a, a, a wank fest really. Yeah. And yeah, it's, I had no idea that you had to pay so much money to go to this thing. That's crazy. Because it's basically, it's not just, you don't just turn up for a day to the Ted talks. It's like a week long thing and like camp. It's almost like a, a camp thing. And you, you like, like one of those bonding. So I think he compared it. He, I think he put out a poll. Is it like a, a, a, Anthony Robbins, Tony Robbins, you know, motivational speaker. Thing. And it's like, Matt Foley. Yeah. Yeah. Man,

Chris Gammell: let me tell you something. I live in a van down by the river.

Dave Jones: And let's walk on some hot coals. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Rah, rah. And all that sort of stuff. So apparently that's what it is. I had no idea. And then I researched. Yeah. I mean, a lot of networking type stuff, right? It's networking. The whole idea is that you spend all your time networking with people. And they, apparently they give the presenters, sorry about the tangent here, but, uh, that's appropriate. And they, they give the, uh, the speakers actually information packs on how to actually network and talk with the attendees and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, interesting. You know, so it's like, yeah, I'm sure the experience for someone who's like up and coming, it's like really, really powerful. Cause you probably get good connections and then you get like speaking gigs later, like corporate events, stuff like that. It's probably very, very good for, for a speaker's career for sure.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Something like that. But yeah, I thought it was just a thing that you just either paid a nominal fee or just turned up for free to. And it's like, no, it's a,

Chris Gammell: yeah, I think the TEDx talks are like that. I think the,

Dave Jones: I think the TEDx talks, cause they're an independent thing, but the actual TED, the real McCoy TED ones, that's a, that's a world unto itself. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea. Anyway, thank you. Past guest,

Chris Gammell: Simone Yatch.

Chris Gammell: she's been on. She, I think she, her and Chris might be the two.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: That we've had on this show that were there. Did Chris wait, did Chris give one?

Dave Jones: You, I don't know. I don't, I don't think so. I don't recall, but he's been to them. Simone's number one. Right. Okay. Yeah. There you go. That's great. So yeah, it just reminded me of that. So did your endeavor, did it make money? I mean, obviously you don't want to lose money, right? Right. Did it lose?

Chris Gammell: No, I, so I, I actually, I, when I pulled the ticket, pulled the trigger on doing, on like selling tickets and like announcing the tickets were sold, I was certain that I was going to break even based on all the analysis I did. And I did. So I broke even. Okay. And actually a little bit more that I was able to give some to, I'm going to be giving some to the, the KICAD project too. So that was, that was another goal.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Excellent.

Dave Jones: Yep. Right. So, and yeah, that's, that's terrific.

Chris Gammell: I had talked to GNU radio. So Derek Kozell, who's been on the show before, Derek is one of the leads for that project. And he had said that they're like a slightly larger, you know, it's like a slightly more like a, like analog devices is like a big sponsor, that kind of thing. And they, they actually have like a higher paid conference where like professionals are paying money to go there, that kind of thing with, because of the training. And it looks like a great conference to have people ever look. It's like an SDR conference. So software defined radio, it's all GNU radio. And that's like, I think 1200, $1,500. It's in like Henderson, Nevada every year, but that's actually a fundraiser as well for the GNU radio project. So, so, which I think is a great way to do it. So maybe we'll work towards that eventually, but I like that it was, you know, accessible by a lot of people. Cool. So yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, I don't, yeah. The $99 thing is like, you know, especially when you've got limited seats. It's not like a trade show where you can essentially have unlimited number of people come through, you know, actually come through, which, yeah. Like, you know, it's no, these are dedicated talks in a dedicated facility, you know, like, yeah, I think it's quite reasonable. I think 99 bucks is, it's cheap as.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The only real bad thing throughout the weekend is that some guy tried to lob a grenade. Was that the wording? Someone tried to lob a grenade into the, uh, into the proceedings. Is that, is that what you said, Dave, on Twitter?

Dave Jones: Lob a grenade?

Chris Gammell: Didn't you say that on Twitter? Like I hear, I'm going to lob a grenade. You made a video about, about Kaikad. Oh, yeah, you did say that. I'm pretty sure you did.

Dave Jones: Yes, I did. I did. I said something along those lines. Yes. I just shared my video with you just in case you hadn't seen it. Cause I knew the conference was ongoing at the time I made that video. So. Right. Great. Yep. Well, why don't we talk about it? Why don't we talk about your, yeah, yeah. All right.

Chris Gammell: Oh, here we go. I'll throw this Kaikad grenade into Kaikon 2019. There we go.

Dave Jones: And, and I had no idea we had talked about it like six years ago or something, seven years ago or something.

Chris Gammell: Well, why don't you explain what you're talking about here first?

Dave Jones: We've talked about everything on this show. Right. Well, my PCB, PCB, my video, if you haven't seen it, which we'll link in down below is, uh, Kaikad wars. And I basically, I, this started out on the forum, I think. Um, so I originally posted this on the forum. Then I thought, Oh, I'll just make a video. Cause I knew the conference was going on. So it'll, it'll, it'll promote some discussion. Anyway, I made two predictions, um, in regards to, uh, Kaikad. And is, is everyone calling it Kaikad now?

Chris Gammell: Nope. Or are there a lot of holdouts? There's a lot of holdouts. I'd say it was about,

Dave Jones: right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: I'd say like 75, 25. So I'm still an underdog, but, uh, I'm not too worried.

Dave Jones: Okay. Got it. All right. You fight now. You had a fight to the death.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Stubborn. You'll cry Kaikad from my cold dead hands or something. Right, right, right. Kaikad from my cold dead hands.

Chris Gammell: This is the hill I will die on. So a lot of, a lot of people, uh, a lot of people, uh, um, you know, like to make fun of me this weekend. They're like, is it, is it DigiKai or is it DigiKey?

Dave Jones: Yep. Nice. Yeah. Oh, love it. Yeah. So I have, uh, two predictions. Ah, geez, if I can remember the name. The, what was the first one? Bloody hell. You know, I'm not in a proper mental state at the moment.

Chris Gammell: That's okay. I think, well, the one that we were talking, I don't, I, the other one I think was about.

Chris Gammell: sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The sponsor maybe. The sponsor, huh? The sponsor of, uh, Wayne, uh, the project lead.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah, no, that's the second, that's the second, second thing. Right. The first prediction is that, uh, paraphrasing is that, uh, key CAD will, it's getting pretty good now that it will ultimately displace, I think any other free tool, you know, it's basically the free tool out there, you know, um, and it'll, it'll displace the other low cost ones. I think, I think there will be key CAD and there will be high end in the not too distant future. I think it'll displace the, uh, the Eagles, the dip traces, the, uh, circuit maker, circuit studio from Altium, although that's a bit of a tough one. Circuit studio is about still about a thousand dollars and it's, you know, it is hot. It does some other stuff. So maybe not that one, but you know, all the low end ones, I think, uh, I think key CAD is going to sweep them all up. Like there's no, I don't see the point in paying for a subscription to Eagle when key CAD is as good as it is now. I don't, I, I, I'm just not seeing it. And I think that's not going to get any better for Eagle. A lot of people have been debating that point with the, uh, fusion 360 integration in Eagle and fair enough. Um, they could still, you know, it's, it's not just like these products aren't just going to vanish. Yeah. I'm saying like, you know, Eagle's being the de facto standard low end for a long time now, just because the open source hardware movement started using that. And that's where it, it, it actually grew from where all support actually grew from. Um, but I think, uh, key CAD is going to take over that if it hasn't already, I don't know where you'd get metrics on that. Um, you know, you just basically get warm fuzzies looking at what, what open source projects are being released in the community and stuff like that. And which package do they use?

Chris Gammell: Right. I think that's a, that's a good proxy. Whereas five,

Dave Jones: whereas five, five, five years ago, it was Eagle everything.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And now it's like, no, I think it's going to change anyway. So that was prediction number one and prediction number two. Yeah. Had to do with your tweet. That's what spurred it on was that, uh, you tweeted that Wayne, sorry, I forget his last name.

Chris Gammell: Stan bar.

Dave Jones: Um, he's the, yep. Is the, he's the, what the head, I guess you'd call him the head lead developer. What is the,

Chris Gammell: he's the project lead.

Dave Jones: He's, he's the project lead. Okay. He's the project lead for key cat is now working on it full time. Right. That's his full time job. And who's paying for that? What was this company that was up on the slide? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So wit wit is like a new, it's kind of confusing still. Um, but it was, uh, it started by the guy that helped, um, found digital ocean, which is actually what we use to like host our, uh, the empire.com. And I use it. They're a host.

Dave Jones: They're a, they're a web host. That's right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. And so he's, he, he was a co-founder of that. And then he's basically funding this new startup and they're basically, they're talking about doing kind of like the full stack top to bottom. Um, so software, um, all the hardware and everything being open as well. So they want to do a completely open stack, which is, you know, really interesting. And so he's also, he's funding it.

Dave Jones: An open stack of what? EDA tools? Like, no, I think, I think actually creating,

Chris Gammell: creating a server, like all the way. So basically the kind of the idea of like, I think it's kind of like a, a really, um, extreme view of like, you don't truly own your data until you own everything in the path. Right. And like the closer you get to that, that ideal, that the, the more open, the more, um, ownership you have of your data. So data being a, uh, a consequence of the hardware and the software that it's, it lives on. And so as far as I understand it, again, this is just me from the little, I talked to the guy there. Um, it'd be like, you know, you'd basically have to, if you want to do everything, you'd have to make it open source server. You'd have to make an open source, you know, you have to design it with open source.

Dave Jones: I was going to say, I, as in a, as in a processor server, web farm server thing, just like Google make their own servers. I believe, um, maybe Facebook as well, make their own, uh, server hardware. Um, wow. Okay. Right. So that's their focus. And they're going to use key CAD to do that. Is that the, that's why they're investing in key CAD?

Chris Gammell: As far as I understand is that, yes, that's right. So basically in order to make it a completely open,

Dave Jones: so they own the design tool that, so they own the design tool. Well, they don't own it, but it's open source, right? So they,

Chris Gammell: exactly.

Dave Jones: So they have control over the, EDA design tools that manufacture their own custom servers, which then run their own, I presume web OS, you know, like server OS. And so, well, no, you can use, uh, Linux, of course, that's right. Exactly. And then like a patch is open. And like, so a lot,

Chris Gammell: a lot of the software stack is already pretty, you know, it's not, uh, I guess it is, it's pretty open all the way to top and down. Right. And so,

Dave Jones: I think it is. I think, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So I think, I think some of us from a privacy standpoint, and some of it's from just, uh, you know, uh, you know, uh, FOSS free open source software and hardware kind of, uh,

Dave Jones: right.

Chris Gammell: I wouldn't say zealotry, but, you know, just like a interest in, in that complete tool chain being open. Interesting. Yeah, it is.

Dave Jones: Wayne works. Does he still work for CERN or did he work for CERN? He never did. No, he was actually,

Chris Gammell: he's, he's an electrical engineer. So he was working for a small, um, right. Industrial hardware company in Virginia. Yeah. And, um, and so, and he was able to just kind of do, he was right. Yeah. Now he's, uh, he's doing this on the side or he was doing this kind of on the side.

Dave Jones: Does he work for Wix or is he, is he an independent contractor and he works and Wix are just paying him? How does that work? Or is he an employee of the new startup? Sorry, I need to know the details. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And so he's an employee of the new startup, but it's actually not Wix. Wix is the software or is the, uh, is the website hosting company that does like those simple starter pages. This is WIT, W-I-T.

Dave Jones: This is WIT. Sorry, WIT. I was saying WIX. I think that's, I think that's actually,

Chris Gammell: I was, I made the same mistake at the beginning, actually. I was like WIX, like the, like the people who advertise to make like a website.

Dave Jones: Annoying pop up. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So now it's, it's slightly different.

Dave Jones: Right. Right. So, okay. So he's an employee of WIT now. Yep. Whose full-time job is to develop KeyCAD or is to project manage and co-develop KeyCAD. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because as I've said many times in the past, it needs to come down to one person driving this thing. You can't have, it's not going to work. KeyCAD's never going to work long-term if you've got 10 people pulling in different directions. Yeah, I agree. I agree. No, that's true. And,

Chris Gammell: you know, so Wayne, Wayne took over around the time when CERN, CERN was getting involved and, you know, he's done really great. He's, he's super driven and, and he's super fun to hang out with. And like, he's got a good vision. So I posted the talk. He did, he did, he did like a recap talk and then a, and then we did a panel instead of him taking questions. I said, all the developers go on stage, all the developers took questions together. And, and that was really good to get kind of like a view of like who everybody is. And, you know, it's crazy. And so we obviously released, we also, I interviewed them when I was there too. And they're all double E's. That's what's great about it. So like, they are all kind of thinking about stuff from the perspective of double E. It's not like, you know, I think a lot of people who work at CAD software companies, even for profit CAD companies, a lot of them have electronics backgrounds. You know, you and I know a couple, a bunch of them too. And so that's good. I think it's, that's the good first step. I think it's then, you know, understanding how the, how the users kind of are using it broadly and kind of broad strokes across the community. And I think they're, I think they're getting good at that stuff too.

Dave Jones: Well, excellent. So that leads onto my second prediction.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: After we've clarified who Wayne is and what's happening. Yep. Excellent. Is that, because I, I had no idea about that. I just threw this out there without knowing any of the details at all. I mean,

Chris Gammell: I was talking to someone, I was like, I was like, this is just kind of what Dave does. I think he just wanted to talk about this stuff. And it's like, it sounded kind of like, it was kind of like reminiscent of like being on the forum. It's like, I wonder if it's this, I wonder if it's that, you know, it's like kind of that kind of same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So of course, it's what I do.

Chris Gammell: Exactly.

Dave Jones: Whether it's popular or not, it's what I do. And so my second prediction is that, um,

Speaker ?: uh,

Dave Jones: given the, well, no, straight off the bat. My second prediction is that ultimately I have no timeframe for this, but somebody will decide to commercialize in quote marks, uh, key cad, just like the way, uh, red hat have sort of, you know, commercialized again in quote marks, uh, uh, Hinnix, right. They've got, they, they charge professional for professional services and all that sort of stuff, even though you can get it for free if you want. Yeah. But there, it found a way to make a multi-billion dollar business.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. They just sold to Microsoft for what, like 30 billion or something, 35 billion,

Dave Jones: 30 billion dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy, crazy amount of money, you know? And, um, and I predict, even though it's a much smaller market, don't want to compare them much more niche, but I think that's ultimately going to happen when, if there's money involved, somebody will add some entrepreneur will decide, um, either, either like an individual entrepreneur who wants to do a startup or something like that, or it'll be a large company who decide, Oh, we're going to commercialize key cat. And of course, a lot of people said, Oh, they can't do that, but they can. Yeah. Right. Of course, if they develop it, yeah, there's nothing. And I don't want to stop it and it should not be frowned upon. Right. It should only be encouraged. So I only want to encourage people to do that. Right. As long as they follow the license agreement and they give back. Right. If they make any changes, they obviously give back to the community. So everyone can build. And, uh, yeah. So I, I think that's ultimately, I can see that happening. That's my second prediction.

Chris Gammell: Right. I could see it happening. I was like, I was listening to your video and I was like, this sounds real familiar, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. I had no idea. What did we talk? I didn't go back and listen to the previous episode. What did we say last time? Did you listen?

Chris Gammell: The whole reason I remembered the whole, the whole thing that triggered my memory about it is like, I remember when you were saying red hat and I remember you and I made a joke about calling it either tinfoil hat or, or lead hat. That was,

Dave Jones: that was not remember. That was the joke. I've usually got a good longterm memory. I do not remember that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I always remember a bad joke, Dave. I always remember. Right. Okay.

Dave Jones: And what was that six years ago or something? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Episode 188. We'll link that into, uh, right.

Dave Jones: So I, I just had the same idea back then. And I just threw that into the discussion. Did I, uh, technically I had the idea,

Chris Gammell: but, uh, you know what? I'll say we had the idea about that. Cause we were like, we were discussing it. I mean, just honestly, of course.

Dave Jones: And when, when you discuss it, it seems kind of obvious that it might eventually happen.

Chris Gammell: Right. I think the parallel is definitely there with like open source tools. And I think, you know, so I actually saw an interesting comment about this where I think it was in the, it was a hack and a comment or on a video. Um, but someone was talking about my company switched over completely to KiCad and, uh, and then they kind of went through like the hours it took to do all the stuff and like the library stuff it takes. And you know, that's the real, that's, you know, it's all the manpower stuff. Oh, of course. Like redoing libraries, redoing this, redoing that. And it's like, that's when it gets really expensive. And so I think the services thing definitely, um, you know, you want to make sure that someone's there and that the software is going to break or anything like that. I'm not sure the complexity is high enough. Like maybe as the, as the, the, the software continues to get more complex as well. I mean, you think about like a Linux system, especially spread across an enterprise type of thing. So like some hotel chain wants to use, uh, what was it called? It was called Fedora and they're like, Oh, we should really pay for red hat and,

Dave Jones: you know,

Chris Gammell: get the service contract too, because there's a lot of money that could be lost. I think there is money that could be lost in the PCB space, but, but probably, you know, the people that are likely to take it on are, um, are, are going to be smaller time businesses at the beginning. Now, as if it does indeed keep growing, like, like you're predicting too, like then, yeah, you know, like, uh, if, uh, you know, uh, say Tesla, say Tesla switched over for some reason, right? Right. Or, or, uh, you know, SpaceX or someone like that. NASA or anyone, you know, a big,

Dave Jones: a big player. Right.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Then you start to have licenses or sorry, you start to have, um, you know, maybe a hundred, a hundred people using it concurrently. And you're trying to like do tools between the two. It's like, yeah, you might want to pay just so you don't have to have someone internal then. And that, in that case, you might, it might make a lot of sense. So,

Dave Jones: yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Interesting. I mean, obviously you've seen a lot of the interest industry, so you, you, you know what it's like. Um, and you know what it's like dealing with current EDA software too. So it's,

Dave Jones: yeah, it's, you know, and, and the high price ones aren't any better in terms of support necessarily.

Chris Gammell: No,

Dave Jones: in fact, it's like,

Chris Gammell: in fact, I can tell you, I think I mentioned this a week or two ago, but, uh, yeah, I, uh, I, I have a little bit of a rant here. Uh, yeah, or CAD, I, I installed or CAD to, to look at like the, the files more in depth. First off, I didn't know the difference between or CAD and Allegro and like, what the hell, did you know what the difference is?

Dave Jones: Uh, not really. I forget. It's long time. Like, apparently they're not that different. I think,

Chris Gammell: I think like one, is actually the, I still don't actually quite know, but it's, it's a real stupid thing. It's, it's all real dumb. Uh, the tool is actually like, you know, obviously very full featured, but God damn, did it ruin my computer. I was like, I went to go make a video about using revision control. And like, I was like halfway, halfway through a video. And I'm like going to like push some changes to a, a, a repository. And it's like, no, I don't know what this is. Uh, you don't have access to this repository. I'm like, okay, that's weird. Did I, did I mess something up? And I try it again, make another video halfway through. I don't know what this is. You don't have permission. There's a repository. Wow. And then I realized like three, three tries later, I realized that, uh, Orcad has completely screwed every single environmental, environmental variable on my windows machine. And I'm going to have to just clean install my computer basically at this point. It's just like, it's such a hot mess.

Dave Jones: Can you go back to a previous revision of windows? Like, you know, windows has a, like go back to previous.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's an interesting point. Yeah, it does. I don't know what it's called,

Dave Jones: but it, yeah, it has that.

Chris Gammell: It has like a, like a save point.

Dave Jones: It has a save point or something. Yeah. Oh, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm not, you might be able to do that. That's a good point. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Some sort of rollback feature or something. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: If any cadence engineers are out there though, not a fan. That's not good. Don't do that to my computer, man. That was, I mean, granted it's like some of us deal with windows, but like, God damn it. Sure. No, it shouldn't.

Dave Jones: It shouldn't. I'm installing, I'm always installing and uninstalling hundreds of programs and windows handles it just fine. So for something to do that, that's just. Right.

Chris Gammell: I think it's always bad when you see something like trying to like, I'm going to install this in the C drive. It's like, when it, when a program's doing that in 2019, you know, it's like just installing it at like the root level. Right.

Dave Jones: At C slash Orcat or something.

Chris Gammell: Slash Cadent. Yeah, exactly. It's like bad. That is, you're going to have a bad time.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. So I found that out.

Dave Jones: Wow. Ouch. That's nasty.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But I haven't had any time to think about it, honestly. So, I'm, I'm fine.

Dave Jones: Right. So you don't disagree that you, you think it's certainly possible. Certainly not an unrealistic, thing. Because as I said in my video, if people don't know the PCB market or the PCB Ecad market, I got a figure from 2012. And back then it was half a billion dollar market.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that's just PCB level. That doesn't include like ASIC design tools and simulation and stuff like that. That's just, you know, that's just PCB tools plus maybe, you know, signal integrity analysis tools, board level stuff and things like that. But that's a big market. It's probably a billion dollars. In the current market. And Altium's current, Altium's current market. Yeah. Worth is like $3 billion. Altium's are technically on the share market. Their shares are valued at $3 billion.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But that's like also like projected future stuff. And Altium's looking at,

Dave Jones: they make like a hundred. Yeah. Their sales are like 120 million a year or something. Sure. But their, uh, price to earnings ratio is so high now because they're paying so many dividends that, you know, it's just insane. But yeah, like there's big money involved here. Sure. I can't help but think some entrepreneur is going to come along and go, hey, you know, if I take 1% of that market, that's a viable, that's a viable business. You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think, I think, I think that's true. I think it's, yeah, it would be a hard fight. I don't think there, anyone's going to give that up easy. You know, the interesting thing, maybe we've talked about it on here at one point, but like, it was the idea. And I talked about some people, I talked about it with some people this weekend was kind of like the idea of like KiCat as a GCC kind of like as a similarity to GCC where it's like, if it does become. In what way? Well, like, okay, GCC was kind of like a, oh yeah. Okay. You and your toys at the beginning. Right. But eventually it was like when you have industry buy-in.

Dave Jones: Everyone uses it. And my microchip used the GCC compiler, you know, it integrates with the, yeah. Right. Everyone uses it.

Chris Gammell: And I think it like, you know, it being kind of like a, I don't think it's a very good comparison, but it's an, you know.

Dave Jones: I think it's not bad. I think it's pretty good. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I guess, I guess the thing that would be to your, to your kind of prediction too, would be like, well, if it does move that way, okay, cool. But then you'd have a lot of companies doing their own, own thing. There'd be like a lot of ad hoc standards at that point. And it's like, okay, basically people that would be sussing out what actually needs to be done. And I think that's where another market opportunity is. So like, okay, like, you know, company aid, it wants to do it like this company. He wants to do it like that. There's going to be like reputation on who, who does things better, that kind of thing. And then like tool, it'll be around,

Dave Jones: around that versus Libre office.

Chris Gammell: And right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I don't think it's, I think it's a, I think it's a good prediction. It's just a matter of how big, you know, how much it is to grow in the market.

Dave Jones: When and how and how big. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, the odds are, I would, I would bet that it might, it'll ultimately happen in some form. And as we've mentioned many times on here, like most of the time, this open source thing is, you know, people don't care. Right. Right. People don't, then they're not going to compile their own version. You know, this was my main complaint, like a couple of years back when I first looked at key, started looking at key CAD and I want, geez, what you can't even down. There's no central repository for even downloading windows executables on, on some guy's personal website. Give me a break. I'm not going to touch that. Right. It's like, that's a joke. Right. I'm not going to muck around with that sort of garbage. Right. Right. It's like making it more like a professional.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: They want a centralized thing. They want the confidence that, you know, look, this is the build. Here it is. You know, like just, just download. They don't want to build anything. Nobody, 99.999% of people will never ever look at the source code, compile. It's the same with open source hardware. Most people don't care. They will never load up the CAD files. They'll never, you know, do anything like that. They'll never, all they want is the finished product.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. And if it doesn't compete in the market at the right price, then it's never going to, it's never actually going to take off.

Dave Jones: And it gives you a warm fuzzy that it's open source. That's great. You know, everyone gets a free warm fuzzy and a pat on the back, but like, yeah, most people don't, they ultimately just want a tool that looks professional and works.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Well,

Chris Gammell: and I think that's a good point though, too. I think the, I think like the open source hardware, the, usually the bigger impacts is because if, if, and when it's open, but then it grows an ecosystem around it. And then you start to hear about it more. Cause like, Oh, well this thing works with Arduino or this thing works with, you know, BeagleBone or whatever. Right. And it's like, and then people are building other things around it and you hear about it more because of that, you know? And, and ultimately that drives, you know, there's always, it's like, you're talking about, it's like a confidence game almost. Right. Of like, well, you know, can I get the software on a reputable looking server? Can I get, you know, can I get some tools around it? Do I hear about people using it? You know, if you have all those things together, then, you know, same thing, hardware and software. Yeah.

Dave Jones: This is why I think key cat has reached critical mass just like this year. And basically in the last few months, especially with key con, right? We don't see Eagle con, right? There's no Eagle con,

Chris Gammell: but they, they haven't done that yet. No, no,

Dave Jones: exactly. Right. There's key con and there's like, you know, major huge players that ever, almost everyone buys from Digi key, right? At least something. And they're hearing about all Digi key are back in it and, and they're releasing the full libraries and all that sort of stuff. It is snowboard. And that, that's why I think it's inevitable. It becomes the industry de facto standard tool, like low end tool.

Chris Gammell: I think you're a little too close to it, Dave. I think you're a little too close to it. What? Cause you talk to me every week, you know? Yeah. Or maybe, maybe. Okay. I've been whispering in your ear for nine years about this thing. Yeah. I know. I know. But still. I think you're, I think you're still right. You know, I'm very optimistic.

Dave Jones: No, it's, it's just, there's more projects. There's just like a massive talk. Sure. I mean, you know, I'm getting it because I follow certain people on Twitter and I, you know, I'm talking to you every second week or whatever, you know, it, it, it makes a difference. Right. But still, I think it's there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I can look past that and see that it's, you know, it's happening. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Anyway, where there's money, they will come.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Businesses. Building businesses.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Some people build businesses in like six hours, man.

Dave Jones: Yes, you did. Tell us all about this. You literally.

Chris Gammell: I built a brand in like six hours.

Dave Jones: You built a brand in six hours and you've released products in six hours.

Chris Gammell: The, the, the products have been around for a much longer. Right. Yes. But I, I, I had been one of my first, one of my first contracts working out of, as a, as a consultant, I was working for a valve, which people may know as a, a, a company. Gaming company. A lot on here. See,

Dave Jones: I, I had literally never heard of valve until Jerry Ellsworth joined.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: I, I, I little, like I, I had no idea that even existed. Like, you know, that's how far removed I am from the gaming industry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I just knew him because all my friends would play like counter-strike, but that was the main thing. Okay. But then like Jerry and Alan Yates and, uh, Ben Krasnow and Jeff Kaiser and, uh, Eric van Weyck. And, uh, I think that's all the guests we've had who have worked at valve. Yep. Um, anyways, uh, do,

Dave Jones: do any of them work at, I think Alan's the only one left, isn't he? Is Alan the only one? Eric's also there. Yeah. So Eric and Alan. Yeah. Yep.

Chris Gammell: And yeah, so I started doing some contracting for them a while back and, uh, and then they decided not to keep going with it. And then they said, Hey, you can release these designs and push them out to the world. And, um, so today, May 1st, when we're recording this, um, the valve index went on presale and, uh, this thing was designed for the valve index.

Dave Jones: And so I don't know the valve indexes of the, uh, headset.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And so basically I'm pushing these designs out in the world. I'll probably be doing a run of some hardware. Basically it's like some add on hardware for the valve index. And I was really excited about it because it was like meant to be for, uh, researchers. So like people who are trying to put sensors onto, um, VR headsets like that are not already in there. So, you know, you might want to put like a LiDAR sensor or something on there, basically making it easy to do that.

Dave Jones: Right. So valve were looking at releasing this themselves. That's why they got you to work on it. Is that, was that the plan or was it like they were going to give, what, give them away to developers or what was the, what was the plan?

Chris Gammell: Um, I'm not sure on that part actually. I mean, we were kind of talking through it. It never really got to the point where, so it, the, it, we got cut off before then. And so, um, and so it's fine. They decided not to move forward with it. And I was like, well, I think this stuff could be useful to the community. And they're like, yeah, we think so too.

Dave Jones: So you ask them just, just like Jerry did.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. That's why I don't put it on the same level at all. Right. Um, but there's, there's some videos where there's some LEDs underneath, uh, the, the front visor of, of the new index.

Dave Jones: And so that's your board. So you've got two products at the moment. One is a fancy lead matrix board, which goes under the visor. So it's a bit of a wankery attachment. Yeah. So that the person watching you play VR can see all these fancy lead. Right.

Chris Gammell: And it's meant to just kind of be a showcasey kind of thing. Right. I should say all this stuff is based on a circuit Python and Adafruit too. So like, it's not like I invented anything from scratch. I was mostly refactoring and stuff like that. Of course, we love Adafruit and their, uh, their stuff mostly because I was like, I wanted to have circuit Python available for, for people. So it's just as easy for people using it. And so, um, so yeah, basically refactored a lot of Adafruit stuff. Um, but then also made it extensible with this researcher board so that it's not, not the LED one, but then the other one, um, to make it easier for, for people to, uh, to basically interact with sensors. So I put on basically every sensor interface I could find, um, quick and feather and, uh, what's the C, Oh, Grove sensors. And, uh, what's the last one? Oh, quick, uh, click rather the, uh, the micro bus. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So, yeah. So just trying to make it easier for researchers. That was kind of the main thing. And I really liked that. I really liked that idea a lot.

Dave Jones: So you've got a website and we haven't mentioned that we were mentioned the company name at the start, reality instruments.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's right.

Dave Jones: Which we're talking about this before the show. I can't believe somebody hadn't already taken that name reality instruments and you got reality instruments.com. Like last night, you just decided to do this.

Chris Gammell: Actually this morning.

Dave Jones: This morning you decided to do reality instruments and now you've got a website up and you're taking pre-orders for, well, expressions of interest or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. It's just a email list at this point. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Not taking money. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, definitely not. Right. And so, yeah, just basically seeing if there's going to be a run, but I'm going to release all the files and stuff like that too.

Dave Jones: I was going to say, it's, I assume it's open.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, it came from Adafruit stuff. So of course I'm going to keep it open. You know, like,

Dave Jones: you don't actually mention that on there though. Oh,

Chris Gammell: I should. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, it will be by the time this posts. How about that? Okay.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Yeah. That is. Yeah. That's great.

Chris Gammell: It was basically just trying to get some more toys into the hands of people that can afford very expensive toys. Yep. Because that, the new Valve Index, it looks very impressive, but it's a thousand dollars. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Serious, hardly. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And then like, that's before you even have the computer too. So like, I'm not a. Oh,

Dave Jones: I say you need a computer to go with it. You can't use it on your regular computer.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, you've got to use the Valve gaming console. Do you?

Chris Gammell: No, I don't think you have to use their computer, but you do need like a really high powered, like you think about the amount of data you're sending. Right. Okay. To these things. It's just like super, super.

Dave Jones: How does it actually connect? Is it like a USB-C thing or how are they? Yes. USB-C. Right. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So that's got like the, I don't think it's Thunderbolt, but it's like pretty high data rate. Yep. And so you're, I mean, you think about the amount of data you're squeezing over a cable. Oh yeah. No, it's enormous. So,

Dave Jones: so they're maxing out USB-C. So there'd be two cables going to this. There'd be USB-C and power. Or do they power it from the USB-C?

Chris Gammell: I think it's just the one cable. Yeah. Okay. So power it from the USB-C. I should say, I've never actually held one of these in my hands too. Okay. All right. I was, I was on the periphery, but you know.

Dave Jones: So you were designing things for stuff you'd never seen.

Chris Gammell: I was designing things for 3D models that I had seen. So. Right.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was an interesting experience for sure. And, and they were great to work with. So yeah, I don't know. I hope it's, I don't, I don't know how much stuff I'll be doing. Like, you know, I don't know if I'll be doing augmented or virtual reality instruments in the future, but like you said, it's kind of amazing that name is open. So kind of cool.

Dave Jones: Well, we were talking about this before the show names, right? And how you originally wanted to call it what instrument VR or VR instruments. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Instrumented VR. And you rightfully said that that's not a good name.

Dave Jones: Yes. You should not, for those out there, for those young players, try not to incorporate the technology or what's the word that you like the, the technology thing into your name, if possible, you know, keep it like a neutral kind of name. So.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Cause that, that would have like instrumented VR is like, okay, well you're a VR company. Right. Exactly. Whereas reality instruments could be anything.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: It's great. And that's what you want. And you use the example of a parts.io.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Past.

Dave Jones: And I, well,

Chris Gammell: and I think that I called it out specifically because not having, I think having a.com or a.io or a. whatever in like the actual brand.

Dave Jones: In the actual product name. Because they can't call themselves parts. Right. Right. Right. It's, it's, it's not the name of the company is not parts. And the website just happens to be parts.io. The name of the company is actually parts.io. Right. I mean, geez, you know, talking about putting all your eggs in that. Well, there's that,

Chris Gammell: but I think I might was make a little bit more practical too. Like sometimes it just gets really awkward to like say, and like certain phrasing around it's really tough. So like if you, so if you, let's just use a different example of like evblog.com. Right. If you, if you had been like, welcome to evblog.com, you know, you say, you just say evblog.com. Right. And it's like adding the.com, like pets.com or whatever. Like a lot of those.

Dave Jones: That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yep. There was no, like at least evblog is distinguishing from otherwise. Pets.com. Like you said, if you take off the.com, it's just pets.

Dave Jones: It's just pets. It makes no,

Chris Gammell: you literally can't trademark that or anything else. And it sounds kind of silly. Yep. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. So that's just a, a branding thing. Yep.

Dave Jones: Although I, I, I made the same mistake, right? My company is the, well, my company is not evblog. I trade. That's sort of like the trading. Sure. My, you know, my actual proprietary limited name is something more boring. Um, but which, which nobody ever sees really. I know what it is. It's just for tax purposes, right? It's, yeah, it's just for. Yeah. It doesn't matter after certain points. No, no, it doesn't matter. It's just for legal, but my brand is evblog. My trademark brand is evblog. And of course I never put any real thought into that. In fact, I, I originally called it the electronics engineering video blog. And so I short it. So when I first did it, I went, well, I can't put that in the title of every video. So I shortened it to evblog for, and, and just temporarily while I found a better name and I put it out there to the community and the community didn't couldn't, didn't come up with a better name. So I just ran with ev. I just sort of out of sheer complacency of not finding a better name. It just sort of became the evblog by, you know, de facto standard. And really that locks me in. Cause it's sort of like blog. What is it? Like, like it's like, it incorporates the technology into the name. So I'm, you know, so don't take mine as an example. I still think it's pretty shitty name to this day. I do. I do like it in that it's unique. It's trademarkable. And then the ev part, then I can, instead of having blog, I can have ev discover, you know, I can have ev academy. I can have ev something else.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: It's almost ev instead of, but even then that stand, if you actually look at the acronym, it's got video in it. Right. Right. So it's like, no, don't. But anyway.

Chris Gammell: Naming stuff gets weird. I was talking to someone about branding stuff over the weekend too. And it's just like, it's tough, you know, like. Oh yeah, for sure. You know, it's just like you can pay consultants a lot too, and they're just going to throw out some potential stuff and nothing's going to feel right. Usually the best thing is to just like you did, just pick something, go with it. You know, like sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. Ultimately it's what you do behind the company that really matters. Right. Yeah. It's, it's awkward. Sorry.

Dave Jones: Well, this actually, um, it's a little, it's still on topic, but there's a YouTuber out there called, uh, Tim pool. And I've like, he's in like does news commentary and stuff like that. And he's got, cause this is a real interesting example of, of protecting your trademark. Right. He's got this, um, uh, you know, he's got a YouTube channel that goes under his own name. Right. But he's also got this, uh, company that he has like a website for. God, what's the name of it? Uh, uh, I'm trying to find it. I'm trying to find it. Um, and,

Chris Gammell: so what is the basis of his business? So basically he goes over, it's,

Dave Jones: it's, it's news. It's like news, current affairs kind of, you know, he's, he does generic, but political commentary, you know, all that.

Chris Gammell: He's not the British guy that stands in front of parliament and swears a lot. Is he?

Dave Jones: No, no, that's, um,

Chris Gammell: that guy's great.

Dave Jones: Oh, the, uh, the, the comedian you're talking about,

Chris Gammell: exactly. Yeah. He was like explaining Brexit in front of, in front of, Oh, he's hilarious. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, he does these great monologue skits. Oh yeah. Yeah. Absolutely hilarious. Um, yeah. And anyway, uh, yeah, I'm about to get it. I'm about to get it. I'm about to get it. And, uh, Subverse, right? So he had this company, so it kind of like was almost a made up word. Anyway, these, so that his company name was called Subverse and, and he had a website and he's been trying to build that Subverse brand for many years. I really had no idea. He had that, but anyway,

Chris Gammell: right.

Dave Jones: Um, so some, um, a, like a soft porn company or who, who made porn, kind of like not kind of like porn ish video games, you know, ones with the big breast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So this gaming company decided to do this Kickstarter and they called their products Subverse, exactly the same. And of course, and all of a sudden it's, and it did well on Kickstarter. It's getting like a million dollars or something. And all of a sudden he noticed that Google. Now, when you search Subverse, all it does is pop up with this porn Kickstarter game. So overnight they basically hijacked his brand that he had been building for years. And he went, well, what the hell do I do? I can't compete against this porn. Can't, you know, this large, well, large ish, you know, gaming company who make this porn stuff. So my brand's forever going to be associated with this, like, you know, risque video game thing. What the hell do I do? And B, they got away with it because he hadn't trademarked his name Subverse in the UK. So they were legally allowed to use it in the UK. And of course, Google doesn't care if you're in the UK or not. Google just indexes. Yeah. They just want to know who's most popular. Yeah. They want to know who's most popular. So it, it, it literally obliterated him from the search rankings. And he now, well, what do I do? Do I engage trademark lawyers and fight this? No, that'll cost, you know, half a million bucks or something, you know, and you probably won't win anyway. Or even if you do win, it'll be a hollow victory because they would have still have dominated the search results. Right. So they're, they're just killing you in the search results, which is a big part of having a brand like that. You know, if people want to, you know, do business with him and they, search, Oh, who's subverse? And they pop up with this gaming, you know,

Chris Gammell: right. Yeah. Their spam filters go off, right? Like, yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. It's like, no, I'm not going to have anything to do with that guy. Right. And, um, yeah, it's, it's, I think he's, and I, I commented on his video and it got tons of thumbs up and comments and stuff that I think he's going to have to abandon that brand. Sorry. Yeah. YouTuber stuff. And I, I think he's going to have to abandon that brand. I think he doesn't really have a choice. I think it's forever.

Chris Gammell: You got to fight a run, right? You know, it's almost like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's like, and if I, even if he fights and wins, it's still not a win.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Like he's not going to get the search results back maybe in a couple of years, maybe if you force a company to go under and, but like, yeah, like you've got to be careful with branding. And anyway, it reminded me of that, how literally overnight somebody can legally steal your brand and whether or not it was intentional, I, you know, we, we don't really know, but.

Chris Gammell: So me, me standing up a brand that I reminded you of soft porn. Is that what I'm hearing?

Dave Jones: That's right. Yes. Okay. Well, it's, it's not even porn. It's just like a risque video game. Yeah. I don't get those things. Yeah. Right. But anyway, it's, there's a big market for that kind of thing. So yeah, that's just, that's, yeah, you've got to be careful actually protecting your brands and stuff like that. Yeah. That's true. Like I've, I've, I've had people try and hijack the EEV blog brand. Right. I think there was some guy in, I don't know, Romania or something who, who called it EEV blog something. And you know, it's completely innocent. He wanted, you know, he loved my blog and he wanted to make his own and he called it EEV blog something else. You know, not like, I think he just didn't, you know, think about the, I didn't do anything about it. Cause he's got like two subscribers or something, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: It's like, but, but somebody found it somewhere and pointed me to it. And it's like, okay. You know, I'm like, I'm, I'm not, I'm not in any danger of, of being some suddenly swamped in the search results, you know? So it's like, watch out,

Chris Gammell: man. That's what they say at first. And then. Yeah, I know. It's all over.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But yeah, you've got to be, you've got to be careful. And, and even if you trademark it, you can't try, unless you've got very deep pockets, you're, you're not going to trademark it in every country on the planet. Right. So there's legally nothing stopping someone trademarking in some other country where, where you haven't defended that. Yeah, I know. That's crazy. You can't defend that trademark. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So anyway, branding. Wow. It's important. Anyway, I like your new brand. Reality instruments. That's like, I'm, I'm stunned. Stunned. I'm, I'm jealous. I like, I, I would have just, I'll sell it to you. You'll sell it to me. Yep. That's, that's really good. I like that. Now I'll, I'll just, I'll just register something that sounds similar and hijack your search results. There you go. You know, you know, real, I'll call it real instruments. Real instruments. Instead of real. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That one might actually be already be.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: That's great. Anyway, well done. Thanks. So that, that's interesting that you had to scramble to capitalize on the, um, uh, with, with the release of valve, because you had no idea they were releasing this, right? Right. So all of a sudden you went, Oh, they've released it.

Chris Gammell: I heard that the, uh, this, the stuff was coming, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. But you didn't really know. And then once it did come, you thought busy.

Chris Gammell: That's the other thing, you know, I was right. Yeah, of course. Right.

Dave Jones: There, there, there is a real instruments, real instruments.ca. So there's a California company called real. It's Canadian.

Chris Gammell: That's Canadian.

Dave Jones: I'm sorry. What'd I say?

Chris Gammell: You said California,

Dave Jones: California, Canadian.

Chris Gammell: I make that. I do that too.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, real instruments. Yeah, there he is. Dennis Leroy. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'll tell you a, um, a brand that is available to purchase probably is Anki. Did you see that news story?

Dave Jones: Who the hell is, who or what is Anki?

Chris Gammell: The once hot robotics startup, startup Anki is shutting down after raising more than $200 million.

Dave Jones: I think I tweeted that. Yeah. I'd never heard of him before, but I thought it was interesting. How did they, was it a start? Was it like a Kickstarter based startup or was it a?

Chris Gammell: No, I don't think so. Um, but they, the basically, the reason I knew about him actually, Alicia and Chris over at, uh, embedded, they talked about kind of these emotive robots, kind of this new, um, this new version of not version, uh, sub brand.

Dave Jones: A category of category.

Chris Gammell: Sure. That's good. Um, but like, yeah, they're like these, these like cute, cutesy kind of like emotive robots. And, um, and they're kind of, they were like, it's a Tamagotchi.

Dave Jones: Or is it like, yeah, sort of, you know, I mean,

Chris Gammell: they're like, they're meant to interact with the humans and they're, you know, they're kind of cute and they, they need some things and that kind of stuff. Um,

Dave Jones: it's like having a real pet, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like that thing. And I think that like, this is, I remember seeing some stuff about that in Japan a while ago, but it was kind of more,

Dave Jones: it, it, it isn't anything new. So it's, you know, it's like 20 years old,

Chris Gammell: but right. I think it's more of the cost had come down enough that the, the accessibility,

Dave Jones: it's viable. Or you can do a lot more. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, um,

Dave Jones: right. And anyway, so they were like a leader in that space where that market space, were they?

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Exactly. Right.

Dave Jones: Did they actually have a product released or was it still like,

Chris Gammell: they did. If you look at that little robot that they show on the article, the Cosmo, that is, that is one that's out. Um, right. But I think the thing is, it just wasn't going anywhere, you know, like where do you go? Like, what else do you do? Do?

Dave Jones: No, it's almost a one product company or a two product company. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's, and it's,

Chris Gammell: it is cute. I mean, it's meant to be like, you know, accessible too. There's an SDK for the robot and stuff like that too. Yeah. So it's meant to kind of, um, you know, be cute and accessible and you can develop stuff for it. But at the end of the day, I think the, you know, the most useful robots that are out there are usually, you know, the still same thing, single use, big, heavy, uh, and everything else. Uh, you know, maybe with, with some exceptions coming up, uh, there's actually another article on the, on the Reddit as well. Uh, Mark Raybert showing off the close to production, uh, spot mini. I don't know if you saw that one as well. Uh, no, I don't think so. So basically it's the spot mini was that really, really creepy Boston dynamics one. It's silent. Oh yes,

Dave Jones: I know. I did see that. Yeah. I saw the stage presentation. Yeah, sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's the one that's silent. It's yellow. It's got, uh, it's shorter than the, than the, uh, spot. And then the, the big, big dog as well. So remember we had James Bruton on, he does the alpha dog. So people know that one. Uh, the,

Dave Jones: if people don't know and you want to visualize it, it's like a four legged dog with a, with a sort of like a duck bill robotic, um, head, which is not the head. It doesn't really have a head. They say it's an arm. So it's a headless dog with a big, um, that can rotate in axis. Right.

Chris Gammell: And there was that really creepy video a while back where it was opening the door.

Dave Jones: Opening doors. Yes. That's where people probably remember.

Chris Gammell: Cause it looked like a scene in Jurassic park. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: When the dinosaurs were getting smart enough to open the doors. Yeah. That's it. That's what freaked people out.

Chris Gammell: I'm still freaked out, but I mean like they're actually, so I think the thing is they're, they're starting to actually talk about some of the production or sorry, they're starting to talk about some of the use cases. Um, and some of them actually do make some more sense. Um, like what they're talking about using it for, like oil derricks and stuff like that. And, you know, using it out in the field, um, that could, and I think that, you know, oil and gas is probably an industry that could actually afford something like this. Cause I haven't seen a price yet, but I'm guessing it's,

Dave Jones: I come from that industry. Trust me. Five to six figures.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They can afford it.

Chris Gammell: But, uh, you know, like this, I think the cost and the, the reliability level, you know, like comparing it to like a consumer levels, you know, comparing consumer level, Anki startup to like Boston dynamics, which is like,

Dave Jones: yeah, no, I, very reliable. If you want my opinion and you're going to get it anyway. Yeah. Boston dynamics should not even attempt to go into the consumer market. They should focus on, on, you know, on, on that industrial space for sure. Yeah. Yeah. We, we can pay 50,000, you know, we can charge $50,000 for one robot and it's not a problem. You know, people go, Oh, that's fine. You know, we, we, we need a bomb defusal robot. We need a robot that can go onto an oil rig and, and, you know, go into dangerous situations and, and the search and, and, you know, do things with its arm and yeah, there's, you know, 50 grand or something. It's nothing.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yep.

Dave Jones: Chump change. Yeah. So this company was huge. This Anki company, they had, it was a 10, $200 million venture capital, but they, they had in 2017, they had a hundred million dollars in revenue. Well, they sell it. Did they sell a hundred million bucks worth of these little robots?

Chris Gammell: I guess.

Dave Jones: I presume so. I guess. Unless they're selling like a software or something else there,

Chris Gammell: you know,

Dave Jones: where else did they get revenue from anyway? Yeah. This was a huge company in 2017, a hundred million dollars revenue. And they've gone bust. Does it say how I haven't ever, have we got a TL deal?

Chris Gammell: TLDR. Uh,

Dave Jones: too long. Didn't read.

Chris Gammell: No,

Dave Jones: no, no. They just, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I didn't catch that part.

Dave Jones: Funding ran out.

Chris Gammell: I think it's the thing because it was so fast. Oh, here we go. They actually did do, sorry. They did do a crowdfunding campaign to vector, a small robot.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: So it seems like it was doing some stuff. This is the one I had seen. The vector was the one I had seen.

Dave Jones: A hundred million in revenue is huge. That's a huge company. How do they lose money? It's just the same way. Patreon are going to go bankrupt if they can't, you know, get other sources. You know, how do you lose money? It's because you took too much. Yeah. You took too much. They took too much. Patreon took too much. Tons of companies have taken too much investment capital. Right. And, and that, that just destroys them. Even though if you've got a hundred million dollars revenue, you can go under bam like that.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. I mean, yeah. If you're not doing something that's going to make, you know, the billion dollars that the investors want, it could be real bad.

Dave Jones: The investors want their money back. Yeah. You know, tenfold.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Or at least several fold to, you know, actually escape it with their integrity intact, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And if they don't see that happening, then you don't get any more money. And, you know, and overnight you're out of business, literally.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Like, because you can't pay people's wages. So you've got to shut down, you know, you're out of cash.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's rough.

Dave Jones: Tough business. Don't take investment money, people.

Chris Gammell: Okay. I won't.

Dave Jones: It looks great at first, you know? Oh yeah, look, I got a $50 million company. And then it all just falls. Yeah. I think, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, I always refer people back to the, the documentary, Silicon Valley. Which documentary?

Dave Jones: Oh yes, the documentary that is Silicon Valley. Yes, that's right. Yeah. I actually,

Chris Gammell: I did watch the Elizabeth Holmes, The Blood. I don't know if you've watched that documentary.

Dave Jones: Oh, has it come out?

Chris Gammell: It was on Netflix in the States at least. It's, it's real.

Speaker ?: Oh,

Chris Gammell: was it? Okay. We don't get,

Dave Jones: yeah. I'm not a fan of it. I'll have a look. Okay. No, why? What was wrong with it?

Chris Gammell: They just, they made it way creeper than they needed to. It was very creepy. I found it to be very creepy.

Dave Jones: Creepy in what way?

Chris Gammell: Like how they, they used her own voice to like voice over a lot of it. It was really.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. So it wasn't, the story was creepy. It was like,

Chris Gammell: well, no, it was just that they, they, that they used her own words for like, it was just, I didn't, I didn't like it. Oh, really? It's very unsettling.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's, that's, no. It's worth watching.

Chris Gammell: Cause I honestly, like I know, I had seen some of the new stuff, but, you know, in terms of like hubris in terms of companies, it's by not, it's by far not the only company, you know, story out there like that, but it was, of course, very extensive. Um, so it is worth watching. It was probably about a half hour too long. It was like an hour and a half. It probably could have been an hour. Um, and, uh, but like what it, you know, my, um, my girlfriend's, uh, friend had recommended it to us. And then I was like, well, you can get a lot of this stuff from watching Silicon Valley. Like a lot of it is like, it's like, you know, the same kind of thing. Um, yeah. So. Got it. I keep going. If people haven't watched it, you gotta watch it. It's so good. I can't wait for it to come back. Um, yeah.

Dave Jones: Speaking of, um, uh, pets and kickstarting and. Yeah. All that sort of jazz. Um, the, the verge, um, is, you know, um, unreputable as they are. Anyway, they, they released a, uh, they, they released a, they did like a special video, um, on, I think I tweeted it or retweeted a comment about it. Find it that way. Uh, on, uh, Kickstarter projects and how they are risky and how, you know, you can lose your money. And it's like, well, it's finally getting some coverage. Yeah. Thanks for stating the obvious. And, uh, one of their examples, actually one of their triumphant examples was this, uh, pet, um, and no, Mauser, Mauser with an R instead of Mauser, the component company. Right. There's another branding thing that you can hijack, you know, you're a typo. Oh,

Chris Gammell: there's no E.

Dave Jones: M O U S R. Yeah. There's no E.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Mauser. And they, four years ago, they did this Kickstarter where they raised a couple hundred thousand dollars or something to do this little, uh, little robot, uh, thing, which, um, which is designed to, um, keep your cat. Oh, yeah. You know, it's got like a thing in it and drags it around the floor and the cat chase it. Yeah. It runs away from the cat and all that sort of stuff. And it took, ultimately took them four years before they delivered that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, but they delivered.

Dave Jones: But they, they did deliver.

Chris Gammell: I think you got to cover that in a positive light. I mean, that's, that's,

Dave Jones: that's what it was. Yeah. That's what it was. And, uh, yeah, unfortunately the, uh, doco, it was okay. Like little five minute, eight minute thing. It was, you know, it was okay, but it didn't cover the fact that, you know, uh, like there's lots of simply impractical and unviable ideas out there. So anyway, we, we, we won't cover that again.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, that just reminded me four years to develop this little robot. And like you said before, like it's, it, you become a one product company. Like, where do you go? Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Like,

Dave Jones: like what do you do? I mean, you're okay. You're called mousy. Your company is probably called mouser. It's built around this one mouse product. I guess we'll make, uh,

Chris Gammell: input devices. Mouser 2.0. Uh,

Dave Jones: for a computer now. Right. Yeah. That's so easy. Your cat can use it. Right. And your cat can start using Facebook.

Chris Gammell: Do you, do you have a keyboard cat?

Dave Jones: Do you have your cat mouser? Yeah. Oh boy. So there's, you know, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with starting a one product company, but yeah, you've just got to realize that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think a lot of it, it comes down to the, uh, you know, economic stuff around, you know, like so much of it is people who don't know, um, what they're doing. And, uh, I will call out, uh, so Mr. Brian Benchoff, uh, friend of, friend of the show and a hackaday writer, friend of the show, a writer and a troll extraordinaire. One of my favorites. Uh, he wrote a great, uh, thing about, uh, unit costs and economics. It's called on the form. It's called, or sorry, on the subreddit is called first 500 pay for the next 500. Um, basically he's talking about the, the tooling costs for this plastics design he is doing for a badge project. And, uh, he's kind of just running through it and all of his build, build logs through that have been really good. Um, so I do recommend people check that out as well. You know, like a lot of, a lot of the times it is, it's that, you know, it's still that small scale manufacturing thing and getting past those tooling. costs, you know? Um, and it's, if you don't have, if you don't have the comp, you know, some people have just the confidence they're going to get to 10,000 and it's like, they're willing to do it. They'll raise money on it. That's whatever. They might even have the, the POs in hand to do it. And it's like, at that point you basically, you fast forward the whole process. I've seen that happen before where it's like, Oh yeah, we're just going to cut a tool. We're going to order a thousand at a time. We're going to do everything. And it's like, all of your costs are based on that. But when you don't have that, like Brian's talking about in this, in this article, it's like when you're trying to sell piece by piece, you don't know what the actual, uh, expected, expected, uh, thing is. Maybe you have a Kickstarter, but even then, you know, like if you don't have it all priced in the beginning, you could really get yourself screwed. So it's good that, uh, Brian's doing this whole, this whole thing and making it public. I really like that. So, um, and then there's one other, uh, there's one other link about badges. Uh, it's a Twitter thread and, uh, it's basically someone who's doing real small scale assembly, but it's a really good thread about like what they learned and like kind of all the way through, like doing hand assembly for this whole thing. And I think it'll, it'll resonate well with people that are listening here, um, for, you know, doing small scale electronics type stuff and, uh, you know, just kind of lessons they learned and doing a lot of hand assembly with toaster ovens and stuff like that. So it's good stuff.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Cool. Well, that about wraps it up. I think so.

Chris Gammell: I got to go edit a bunch of last week's shows. As weird as that sounds.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Yeah. So, yeah, we'll, so we'll be, you'll be dribbling those out over the next two weeks.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Uh, actually probably I'm trying to get, trying to get them all out before this show gets out. That's kind of weird to say, but I want to get everything done. 440. Really? We're recording 441 right now. I want to get 440.2345 and six out before then. So.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: Jeez. You're blowing your wad there.

Chris Gammell: What?

Dave Jones: Jeez. I thought I was bad.

Chris Gammell: What?

Dave Jones: I thought I couldn't keep it in my pants and you're like,

Chris Gammell: I just want to get, I just want the numbers to be in order today. That's the pure thing. I want,

Dave Jones: I don't want people to be like, Oh, frigging. I feel the pain. Yeah. I know. Yes. As somebody who's numbered all of my episodes. Yes. I know the, I know the number in pain. Yeah. The number in dilemma.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm. So.

Dave Jones: That's another thing, kiddies. Don't, don't number your stuff. You'll, you'll, you'll go insane. Yeah, exactly. There's advantages to it, but you'll probably just, yeah, you might go insane. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well, let's recap our insanity in two more weeks, huh?

Dave Jones: Will do.

Chris Gammell: All right. See ya.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

Speaker ?: Bye. Thank you.